The quiet man in the gray cardigan turned the badge face up on the coffee table so that every folding chair in the circle could see it. It was a gold shield with a state seal and an engraved line that read Ohio State Board of Pharmacy, Agent. “My name is Walter Haynes,” he said, in a mild, even voice. “I joined this group in April because Mrs. Underwood pharmacist called us about her prescriptions. Twelve pills missing every week.” Jaden had stood up so fast his chair had tipped over behind him. I am Mavis Underwood, eighty two years old, and I sat with my cane across my knees and my little notebook in my lap.
I had counted those pills every morning and every night for seven months, and I wrote the count in a spiral notebook with a pencil, because Earl taught me that a number on paper cannot lie. In 1963, Earl drilled holes in a yardstick and made the best seed spacer in Ohio. He was patient, and he never raised his voice. When my grandson moved in, I thought it was a blessing. By February, I knew it was a theft. I told no one but my pharmacist, who is a good woman, and she told Agent Haynes.
The ladies of my small group, six of them with their tote bags and their cardigans, sat bolt upright. Sister Birdie, ninety years old, who had taught Sunday school for sixty years, pressed her hand to her heart. Pastor Mills hovered at the door of the church basement with a coffee urn in his hand, forgotten. A radiator clanked. Jaden stood in the circle with his arms hanging, twenty four years old, in a hooded sweatshirt, and for the first time since he was a little boy in the garden, I saw fear in his eyes.
A quiet badge laid on a coffee table gave one widow the length of a small group meeting to bring her grandson back to the truth in Dayton.
I gave my terms from my folding chair. “Jaden, sit down. I love you, and I will not let them take you to the jail on Third Street. Agent Haynes tells me that if you tell him who is buying the pills at the bus station, and if you go into the diversion program of Montgomery County, you will have a chance. You will live in my house, and you will go to the clinic every Tuesday and Thursday. You will pay me back every dollar you took, a little at a time. And you will help me plant tomatoes in the spring, because I have a bad knee.”
My grandson sat down hard on the edge of the chair, and the hood fell back from his head. “Grandma, I hurt my back lifting boxes at the warehouse, and the doctor gave me pills,” he said, in a thick, shaking voice. “When they ran out, I took yours. Then I took them to sell, because a guy at the station said he would pay me forty dollars each.” He covered his eyes. “I told the group you were seeing things because I knew they would believe me. I thought you would be too old to catch me. I am the worst grandson in Ohio.”
But the old panic came up in him like a tide. Jaden sprang from the chair, snatched the spiral notebook from my lap, and ran for the exit door of the church basement, babbling that he would tear out the pages. He reached the door. Sister Birdie got there first, in spite of her ninety years, and put her walker squarely across the passage. Two of the ladies rose together and stood behind her with their tote bags. And Agent Haynes, without raising his voice, said from the middle of the room, “Son, those pages are already copied.”
Jaden halted at the basement door with the notebook crushed against his sweatshirt, and the long fluorescent tubes buzzed over his head. The ladies of the small group watched him in a ring. Sister Birdie spoke, in the cracked, kind voice of a woman who had seen sixty years of boys. “Jaden Underwood, I taught your grandfather to read his Bible. You turn around and hand your grandmother her book.” His shoulders slumped. He walked back across the linoleum, put the notebook on my knees, and sank down beside my chair, and laid his head against my arm.
The consequences were gentle and strict. Jaden told Agent Haynes everything he knew, and the man at the bus station was arrested within the week. The judge placed Jaden in the diversion program, and he attended every session. He moved his things into the spare room of my house in Belmont and cut the grass without being asked. I locked my pills in a metal box, and he held the key, and at the end of each week, we counted them together at the kitchen table with the notebook between us.
In the name of my husband Earl, who passed in 2022, I started the Earl Underwood Fund. It pays for raised garden beds and seed packets for seniors and for recovery counseling for young people struggling with pills, in Montgomery, Greene and Miami counties. In the first year we built ninety raised beds and paid for fifty three counseling stays. One was an eighty six year old widower from Kettering who had not been outdoors in a year, and who planted his first row of beans from a lawn chair with a yardstick in his hand.
On a warm Saturday in May, Jaden and I knelt together in the backyard, in the black soil, with the old seed spacer between us on the dirt. His hands were steady, and his eyes were clear. He dropped a seed into each hole, perfectly spaced, as his grandfather had taught me, and I covered each one with my palm. When the row was done, he sat back on his heels and wiped his forehead, and he looked at me with a face I had not seen in two years. “Grandma,” he said, “I think I am growing too.”
